Matchbook Distilling Day Trip Blueberry Amaro

16% ABV

Producer Notes:
The blueberries come from a family farm that’s devoted itself to this one fruit. Our friend Clark at Briermere makes the drive south with his refrigerated truck and returns with trays of berries so ripe they’re practically bursting — staining our hands (and shirts) deep purple before they even hit the fermenter.

We start by treading the berries — that means stomping them into juice — and pitching yeast quickly. Blueberries are tricky: low in sugar and high in pH, they’re incredibly vulnerable to wild microbes. So timing is everything. We move fast, catching the fermentation early and punching down the cap of skins daily. When the wine reaches its peak — wildly aromatic, all gleaming color and intense fruit — we fortify it to capture that moment in time.

The fortification blend is heady and complex. We distill a botanical mix of yuzu, makrut lime leaf, cherry blossom, lemon peel, coconut, and cinnamon — all using our house-made, organic corn spirit. That base spirit starts with NY-grown corn, fermented and distilled on-site, then used to extract delicate aromatics from each ingredient. The result is a layered, luminous distillate that lifts the blueberry wine into something otherworldly.

For sweetness, we make a syrup that’s a little cheeky, a little nostalgic: cornflakes steeped in hot water and sugar, then blended with a whole pound of Madagascar vanilla beans from Rare Tea Cellar. The cereal adds toast and cream notes; the vanilla brings warmth, depth, and a certain indulgent softness. Together, they give Blueberry Daytrip a sweet edge that’s generous but not cloying.

To balance it all out, we layer in the bitter. Orris root, gentian root, and quassia bark lend structure — a musky, woody, fruit-skin kind of bitterness that lengthens the finish and pulls the sweetness back to earth.

We finish by cold-settling the amaro, dropping the temperature to encourage solids to fall out of suspension, and racking gently off the sediment. What’s left is a clean, vivid expression of summer’s end — just sweet enough, just bitter enough, deeply blue and wildly aromatic.

It’s a bottle meant for transition: aperitif or digestif, sipped neat or swapped into a late-summer Negroni (1 oz gin, 1 oz Daytrip, optional dry vermouth). Or poured over ice at a picnic, on the beach, in the last light of September.

This is Blueberry Daytrip. Drink it while the days are still long.

About Matchbook Distilling:

Located on the North Fork of Long Island, Matchbook is the brainchild of distiller Leslie Merinoff-Kwasnieski. They produce an immensely diverse set of spirits built primarily around the abundant produce of their local farmers. Although they make a number of conventional spirits like 2 different grain to glass vodka's and some relatively straightforward American Whiskies, they are perhaps best known for their unconventional offerings. Smoked Pineapple Eau de Vie. Blueberry Amaro. Sunchoke and Honey Spirit. Everything that we've tasted from Matchbook has at the very least made us think, and most of the time it's made us want to drink more of whatever they've come up with. Truly a pioneering distilling team.